Lecture XVII

If you look at a human being on earth in his physical body, one cannot really think of this body's structure in terms of mere growth or in terms of the shooting and sprouting that goes on in it. You must add some degradative processes to the organism, that lead to excretions. They represent degradation and they show that the physical body is in a continual process of destruction which, however, is destined to absorb spiritual things, since it is degradation at the physical level; so that the spirit can then live in the physical, degradative processes. We know that spiritual things don't live in a human organism's anabolic processes. Spiritual things are suppressed and not promoted when man grows and when physical processes are becoming more active. Materialists are very silly when they say that man only has to purify the shooting and sprouting life in his brain, and that a continuation of biological processes becomes refined and transformed there—and that this amounts to thinking. If the brain would only be a continuation of digestive processes it would have dull, vegetative inner experiences. Spiritual things only enter the brain because it is continuously punctured by physical processes, as it were, so that it decomposes and falls apart. Spiritual things intervene in physical things in a creative way via degradation. The physical body absorbs degradative processes. We see that an inhibition and a holding back is built into the growth.